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Author Archives: Marta Gouger

Marta Gouger

Marta Gouger is the managing editor online and Home and Garden editor for the Pocono Record so she’s busy most of the time. Her passions (besides work) include gardening and quilting so she does everything she can to cut corners on housework and other mundane tasks such as weeding.

I’ll be the first one to tell you I’m a birdaholic. I started feeding birds about 20 years ago to entertain my cat but I was the one who became hooked. Fortunately they have support groups for people like me. They are called Feeder Watch programs, bird counts and nature centers. Whenever I get a chance to [...]

One of my first assignments in junior high economics class was to figure out how to arrange living room furniture by filling in little squares on graph paper with colored pencils. You would measure the furniture and then color in the appropriate number of squares based on those dimensions to see where everything would fit. In [...]

It was something right out of a cheap Christmas movie. My husband was putting up the decorations throughout our yard. Lights on the bushes here, lights on the arbor there, spiral Christmas trees throughout the yard. And the Moravian star hanging from the porch ceiling. We’re not even going to talk about the dangers of being [...]

The older I get, the easier I want things to be. Thanksgiving is no exception. The key word is streamline. My mom always made a tent of foil over the turkey. It made the skin crisp and brown while keeping the meat moist. Once she tried making it in a paper bag and the bag [...]

For some people rain is annoyance. To a gardener it’s manna from heaven. Even though the growing season is over for many of us, I smile as I listen to rain falling on the roof. I’m glad it’s not snow – not quite ready for that yet – and I’m happy that our water tables [...]

The 2012 gardening season as we know it is about to end. With temperatures as low as 24 and a freeze warning, those delicate blooms will likely not survive past tonight. That means you need to pick everything you can today. I have all my water bottles lined up for the last of the dahlias. [...]

Many years when I have an abundance of tomatoes, I freeze them in 2-cup containers for soups, sauces and chili. I star by dunking them in boiling water until the skins crack, and then moving them to cold water – the skins pop right off. I chop them and freeze. What could be easier? This year I decided to [...]

Checked the weather forecast for the Poconos and there it was: the worst word in a gardener’s vocabulary. You got it, frost. Patchy frost is in the forecast for Monday morning. In this season of extremes I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. But with the warm weather we’ve had this year, I feel like it [...]

My brother Mark and his wife Kim raise chickens in their yard in Whitney Point, N.Y. They’ve got quite the nature preserve with a full garden and golden eagles sweeping down in the lake behind their house. Mark has shown up with cartons of fresh eggs, telling me that I didn’t know what I was [...]

What’s the most asked question at the West End Fair? “When will you be baking bread?” I don’t know if this is the most asked question, but Norman Burger sure hears it enough. Burger, the president of the Polk Township Historical Society, says he’s hoping the bake oven at the West End Fairgrounds will be [...]

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Marta Gouger

Marta Gouger is the managing editor online and Home and Garden editor for the Pocono Record so she's busy most of the time. Her passions (besides work) include gardening and quilting so she does everything she can to cut corners on housework and ... Read Full